"Atheism is not merely the denial of a dogma. It is the reversal of a subconscious assumption in the soul..." - Chesterton
"We do not really face two rival versions of Christianity. We face Christianity on the one hand and, on the other hand, some other religion that selectively uses Christian words, but is not Christianity." - J. Gresham Machen

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What I believe:
I believe in God the Father Almighty, Creator of heaven and earth.
I believe in Jesus Christ, His only Son, our Lord.
I believe he was conceived by the power of the Holy Spirit and born of the Virgin Mary.
I believe he suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died, and was buried.
I believe he descended to the grave and on the third day he rose again.
I believe he ascended into heaven and is seated at the right hand of the Father.
I believe he will come again to judge the living and the dead.
I believe in the Holy Spirit, the holy catholic church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting.
I believe we are saved by grace alone through faith alone. I believe the Bible is the word of God, without error or contradiction.
I believe God is sovereign over all the universe; omnipotent and omniscient in all things. I believe that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. I believe that pretty much covers it.

Wednesday, 24 July 2013

An Atheist Family Spat

I find this whole exchange fascinating, because it exposes, or at least brings into the light, what to me is the basic flaw in the thinking of those who categorically reject the existence of God, or even the possibility of His existence. That is that they assume an unproven premise - that there is nothing beyond the purely physical, material or natural. That is an assumption. And once one chooses that particular road or direction and begins to travel down it, one can only follow it to wherever it goes, even if it is the wrong road or direction, and even if they refuse to see or admit that it is the wrong road or direction. Once one assumes a premise, all the rest of their thinking must follow in the direction dictated by that premise.

The fly in the atheist ointment, to me, is the very thing in which they insist they are participating - rational thought; the ability to hold one opinion, or make one decision, over another. Because this necessarily involves some kind of conscious control over physical patterns. Some mechanism by which we, as humans, are able to direct the paths of the atoms and molecules that travel within our brains and by which are composed our thoughts and memories.

Atheist Jerry Coyne has said,

...all sciences are in principle reducible to the laws of physics,” Either we’re molecules in motion or we’re not. (Jerry Coyne)

But as the writer of the longer article says,

Nobody thinks his daughter is just molecules in motion and nothing but; nobody thinks the Holocaust was evil, but only in a relative, provisional sense. A materialist who lived his life according to his professed convictions—understanding himself to have no moral agency at all, seeing his friends and enemies and family as genetically determined robots—wouldn’t just be a materialist: He’d be a psychopath.

I think this blind atheistic position is well summed up by another quote from the article, this one by author George Orwell

“One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool.”